


New Beginnings (you deserve the world)

by purple_cellophane



Category: Harry Potter - Fandom, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Drarry, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-21
Updated: 2017-10-21
Packaged: 2019-01-20 14:22:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12434628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purple_cellophane/pseuds/purple_cellophane
Summary: Draco Malfoy is a Reaper and a curse-breaker, not so recently estranged from his partner Harry Potter who now works as a vet, however the wounds are still raw. What happens when the demands of each of their jobs place in them both in the hands of their ex-lovers?Come for the drarry, stay for the metaphysical, existential discussions and the dogs.





	New Beginnings (you deserve the world)

**Author's Note:**

> Heya! Starting writing a new fic as a method of procrastination, please enjoy!

 

“You know, your end of year celebration is coming up,” Pansy said, finally looking up from painting her nails in _Sultry Wine_ and replacing the lid. “I was thinking I might come with you, put on a nice blouse, you know, be a sophisticate.”

“Yes, because dressing as an elephant makes one an elephant,” Draco replied, taking a sip from his tea and flipping the newspaper over.

He remembered the first time Pansy had attempted her divine reformation to be a sophisticate, and had hoped it to be the last. Draco had taken her to an art exhibition after Pansy had insisted she wanted to come; to see what the ‘life of stuck up snobs’ was like, so Draco begrudgingly told her to dress herself appropriately (twice he had to tell her to change her outfit) and drove them to the gallery. Lacking patience or depth of any kind, Pansy had stationed herself beside the couches, complaining about the pain in her feet from her heels. She had checked her watch twelve times, asked when they could leave four times and sighed so many times that Draco had given up on counting. In a desperate attempt to amuse herself, Pansy had tried to strike up conversation with anybody standing near-by; and the nut-job that she was inevitably spilled over the false pretence of elegance and composure her outfit suggested.

When they got home, Pansy changed into ridiculously short pants and a tight strappy singlet, something that she strangely felt more comfortable in than a full length green dress with emeralds to match. It was to be expected when later that night she vowed to never come with Draco to one of his ‘posh snob-shows’ again.

 “I could wear my librarian glasses,” she continued, holding her hand in the air and spreading her fingers, blowing on the nails elegantly and disinterestedly.

 Draco took off his narrow framed reading glasses and struggled to focus on the blurry sight of his friend. “Glasses are used to correct eyesight, not to make an absurd statement about fashion,” he said.

 Draco and Pansy were different as different could be. Draco liked order, tea and silver antiques; Pansy was chaotic, loud, and vibrant. What united them both was their profound ability to be irritated by almost anything and everything, and if Draco was being perfectly honest, it was most likely the foundations of their friendship. Pansy was not easy to define. It was what he liked about her – like trying to trap a bug beneath a cup, never able to catch it before it scampers away. Pansy was like that - like the colours of the leaves, forever changing if you cared enough to look.

He watched with amusement as Pansy went about her strange tea making ritual, her fingers extended so not to ruin her nails and using the padded curve of skin between her thumb and forefinger to grasp the spoon that she stirred anti-clockwise four times and clockwise seven times, banging the bottom of the mug with the tip of the spoon, and repeating this over until she was satisfied. Turn-for-four, turn-for-seven, bang bang bang, repeat.

 

She dropped the tea bag into the rubbish bin and scooped two heaped teaspoons of sugar into her mug. “Pluto, no,” she said sternly, nudging the dog away from the bin with her foot. Pansy sat down heavily beside him, her tea almost spilling down the plummeting neckline of her blouse. Pluto put his head between the pillows of the couch, tongue hanging out one side and resting on the expensive leather, looking up at Draco and asking to be patted. A grimace came over Draco’s face, deciding for the hundredth time this month that he liked his cat much better.

“Jacinthe’s picking me up tomorrow to go to the bride’s house to let them look over flower arrangements,” Pansy said, slipping off her chunky black stilettos and tucker her feet under her legs and slipping a hand into Pluto’s fur to give him a scratch. “Those two are not going to last, judging by the argument they had over the colour of the tablecloths.”

 Draco snorted. “You’re one to talk.” For someone who worked in the wedding planning industry, she failed exemplarily in the relationship department. Men, with the occasional exception of a few women, were in and out of their houses before Draco had time to learn their names.

He turned the page of his newspaper and the smile that had sneakily worked its way onto his face fell as he noticed the person on the page. Potter was usually front page, not last; everybody loved him and after their breakup, everybody hated Draco (even more, if such a thing were possible). His hair was different from last week’s newspaper; he’d had it cut and it sat more on his head as opposed to failing around his forehead in a mishap fashion. Fucking bastard, Draco thought, flinging the paper at the fire place angrily, drinking in the sight of the flames licking hungrily at the pages, black smoke pouring from the grate.

Pansy’s previous words tied with uncomfortable significance into his actions, and Draco looked anywhere besides Pansy, not wanting to acknowledge the look that would be on her face.

 Usually, she ignored it when Draco did this – which was more often than he’d care to admit – refusing to feed into Draco’s childish refusal to move on. However, this time, she whacked him with a woman’s magazine lying by her side, ready to defend her honour. Her purple lips were pursed and she had an eyebrow raised at him. “At least I don’t burn newspaper articles that have photos of my exes on them.”

Draco sighed in resignation, pinching the bridge of his nose, watching Potter’s grinning, happy face burning in the flames. Draco cursed Potter’s contentment; how dare he be happy and leave Draco heartbroken in disrepair, leaning over a bottle of Ogden’s Finest in the early hours of the morning at the times he was feeling particularly sorry for himself, wondering how on earth ‘Potter’ had become ‘Harry’ to him.

 “Don’t you think you’re being a little bit self-indulgent?” Pansy asked, tone critical, but eyes soft and sympathetic in that way that women did. “You broke up with him a whole year ago.”

 They had been together for a little over a year and within those sweet fifteen months, Draco had fallen in love with him. They had been duelling for fun in the Manor’s ballroom when it happened; Draco had caught Harry off guard with a Serpensortia and had been close enough to grab Harry’s wand and throw it across the room. It clattered noisily across the wood and Harry vanished the snake with a wave of his hand. Instead of summoning his wand back, the bastard had lunged at Draco, tackling him only to fall gracelessly to the ground as Draco gained the upper hand. But Harry had held on to him tightly and pulled Draco down with him as his back collided with the floor. Draco landed on his hands heavily, hovering above Harry who was grinning and laughing underneath him and he was _so gorgeous_ that the words had slipped with such catastrophic ease from his lips. It had seemed so fitting at the time. He vividly remembered the way Harry’s smile had slipped and the sparkle in his eyes disappeared and how he shrugged Draco off him, telling him he needed more time, he wasn’t ready. He left the hall, the soft click of the door closing, and in turn, Draco’s heart as well.

He went home and cried like a baby on Pansy’s shoulder and she promised vengeance on him if she were ever to see him again.

He waited with growing distress for Harry to respond to his owls or arrive at his door in the early hours of the morning to explain himself and beg for Draco to take him back. That was another thing Draco fantasised about when leant over his whiskey, gazing hopelessly at the moon. However, nothing of the sort happened. It was when he saw an idle newspaper three months later, telling of Harry’s move to Norway to pursue a job in education, it was finalised. Harry wasn’t coming back. And even then Draco was still in love with him.

 “I know I’m being pathetic,” he said. He wanted to give justification with something like, _but he broke my heart,_ but he knew Pansy would never stand for such a cliché excuse. “I wonder what he’d think of me living in Muggle London now,” he said.

 “No,” Pansy replied shortly. “You don’t wonder anything. You’re over him.”

 “Yeah,” Draco sighed heavily. “I’m over him.”

 They both knew it was a lie.

 

 

 ---------------------------------------------------

 

 

Draco was woken to Pansy jumping on his bed, her hair a mess around her face and barely any clothes on. He looked at her groggily, then shut his eyes again, hoping that when he opened them again, she would disappear. No such luck. Sighing, he sat up, pulling a shirt over his head. Pansy was waiting expectantly on the foot of his bed, two mugs of coffee in hand.

Draco sat up and made grabby hands for the mug, wiping his hair out of his eyes with the back of his hand.

 “I was thinking about how you never answered my question,” Pansy said, handing Draco his favourite mug and tucking her feet under herself.

 “What question?” Draco asked, leaning his head on the shelf of his bookshelf headboard and taking a sip of his coffee.

 “About me coming with you to the party.”

 “That wasn’t a question,” he said, closing his eyes, wondering if his eyelids were always this heavy.  “Besides, don’t you want to go with someone else? You know I’m not going to dance with you."

 Draco would usually be the one to stay at home wrapped in blankets with a rum spiked hot drink, watching rain beat down on the windows, lost in thought, while Pansy was out doing goodness knows what with goodness knows who.

 “Why?” Pansy asked, her tone pleading.

 Pansy knew why. Dancing used to be something he excelled at, but then he came to Muggle London and realised that ‘dancing’ to Muggles was a form of rubbing yourself against your partner. You could imagine Draco’s surprise when he turned up to meet Pansy at her pub in his formal dance wear.

 Draco sighed. He raised his head off the shelf and looked at her, remnants of last night’s eyeliner stuck between the base of her eyelashes. He didn’t want to talk about dancing. “Of course you can come. They already think we’re together anyway.”

 Pansy exploded into glee, even though she must have known she would get her way regardless.

 Each year, his boss hosted a party at his ‘holiday house’, a house that Pansy likened to his manor. Draco disagreed. It was nothing like the Malfoy Manor; the Manor was old and intricate and cold with massively high ceilings and gothic architecture, but his bosses ‘holiday house’ was modern, square cut, no character, lots of windows, not many colours. Nevertheless, it was beautiful in its own right, even if it did not align itself with Draco’s self-confessed pompous tastes.

Draco worked for an organisation that he wasn’t allowed to tell anybody about. There were a couple hundred workers for the organisation, and they were all Reapers. Some people, people like Draco, were given the ability to grant wishes to the people on the to-die list and were partnered with those who were not given that ability. Draco never understood why, but he quickly learned not to question anything. In fact, that was how Pansy and himself ended up becoming such good friends – Pansy had once been a Reaper, but ended up sleeping with the late boss and got them both stripped of their positions.

It had no name, no records, no one in the world apart from the organisation themselves and maybe a handful of top-rung Wizards in the Ministry knew it existed. There were hundreds of them across the globe, all receiving new names and places and dates, contracts for them to fulfil, of which one last dying wish can be granted.

The first time Draco had gone with Pansy to see who he was granting a wish to, Draco thought he might be sick. He was a little boy by the name of Augustus Brockwell with mousey brown hair and a face forever imprinted in Draco’s memory.

He was dying of Tuberculosis, and his parents were too poor to send him to a hospital, the good will of others running dry in the face of death.

Draco had begged his boss to call a Healer, that he could pay for the treatment, but his boss had looked at him over the tops of his glasses with a steely gaze and said, “You yourself cannot save all these people, Malfoy. We get the names and we do what we do. That is all.”

Upon noticing tears in Draco’s eyes, his voice softened, and he said, “You get used to it. Saving this one life will not stop the names from pouring in whose fates are the same as that little boy’s.”

It was then that Draco had realised the nature of life, and the un-necessarily cruel, heartbreaking process of tearing someone’s life away from them. He had cried hard that night.

With deep, deep sorrow in his heart, Draco arrived at Augustus’ house, opened his file, looked at his wish and granted it.

Draco and Pansy stood by, watching helplessly with tight chests as his eyes became glassy, the suffering ending with a shuddering breath.

The scream that tore from the mother’s chest gave him shudders, something made of pure torment, ripped from the very darkest depths of despair. She cradled him in her arms, crying hysterically, praying to God to bring him back.

Three days later, Draco went back to see that Augustus’ wish had come true. A hefty check lay in their mailbox, and Draco was there to witness the mother, her flaxen hair blowing about her in the gale, despair over why this small fortune had not arrived sooner.

 

 

 

 

 

His work was underneath the Department of Mysteries, a place that even few Ministry workers knew existed. It was an eerie place; even though it was fashioned just like a regular office, it had a feeling that made Draco compulsively look over his shoulder. It was where he was headed today, as he slipped on his charcoal overcoat and stepped into the Floo.

His job was something Draco often blamed Potter’s departure upon. It wasn’t built to suit a relationship – his job was built on lies and deceptions and prevarications, all things detrimental to relationships. Potter could sense that there was something not right in Draco’s words, but he never questioned him about it. Draco cursed this alter-ego life he was living behind everyone’s back. He had been willing to give it up for his boyfriend in an instant, but alas, the rules were a bit more intricate than that.

Draco stepped out of the Floo and into the Ministry, walking quickly to the elevators. The Ministry was as busy as ever, and the elevators were no exception to this. Squeezing uncomfortably inside, Draco held on tightly to the rail as the elevator jerked to a start and violently shot backwards.

When Draco wasn’t completing contracts, he worked as a Curse Breaker, not because he enjoyed it but because he needed something to talk about when people asked about his job. He was very good at it anyway, with the absent fear of death enabling him to attempt to break curses many would not touch. He needed something that made his heart beat the way it did when he was with Harry, and if chasing lethal curses out of houses would suffice, then so be it.

 

He waded through a sea of hustling people into the elevator, feeling it jerk and stutter beneath him until it came to a standstill. Down the hallway and seventh door on the left, Draco walked, hating the unnerving feeling that he was being watched that was commonplace in this part of the Ministry. The room was dusty and un-used, the remnants of what used to be a storage room long forgotten by the Ministry. He ran his hand over a rusty cabinet, sliding the doors open and stepping right thorough the back of it, ready to collect another name.

 


End file.
